Businesses struggle mightily to keep their secrets. They spend billions on firewalls and encryption schemes meant to keep out the wolves at the door. But there is still little that can be done when the perpetrators are trusted parties. Intel got a first-hand reminder of that cold reality in June, when it was discovered that Biswamohan Pani, a design engineer at the companyâ¿¿s Hudson, Mass., R&D facility, pilfered the recipes for some of the chipmakerâ¿¿s soon-to-be-released offerings.

Sure, Pani helped develop the recipes for chips such as Intelâ¿¿s Itanium, perhaps adding morsels that made them more appealing to the companyâ¿¿s legions of customers. But Intel owns the rights. And the way he carried out the caper suggests that he knew his actions would leave a bad taste in his employerâ¿¿s mouth and possibly land him in hot water.

Pani turned in his Intel apron at the end of May. But by that time, he had already been hired by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices to cook up some competitive designs at one of its R&D kitchens. Shortly after he reported for duty at AMD on 2 June, he apparently remembered that:

1) he was, technically, still a full-fledged Intel employee, with all the rights and privileges thereof;

2) one of those privileges was access to an encrypted database containing a cache of what are essentially top-secret recipe cards for Intelâ¿¿s chips, plus drawings meant to ensure that the finished products are not half-baked.

The FBI alleges that Pani helped himself to 100 pages of these recipes and 18 drawings. His supposed intent: to blend these trade secrets into the mix at AMD, thus sweetening its batters and becoming a renowned chef.

But when he was clumsily designing this ruseâ¿¿which included a suspicion-diverting story about him going to work for a hedge fundâ¿¿he apparently overlooked one fatal defect. He hadnâ¿¿t figured out how to prevent his former colleagues at Intel from discovering that he was having his chips and eating them too. Once they caught a whiff of what he was up to, his duplicity was sniffed out with simple system access check. Now his goose is cooked.